The Hero of Flint

Marc Edwards by the Flint River in downtown Flint, Mich.
Photograph by Logan Wallace courtesy of Virginia Tech.

When civil engineer Marc Edwards (BS
’86) warned Michigan state officials and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that lead-contaminated
drinking water was poisoning the children of Flint, he expected
them to declare an emergency. Instead, the regulators insisted
there was no cause for alarm.

Taking Matters Into His Own Hands

IT BEGAN QUIETLY enough one day in April 2015, when civil
engineering professor Marc Edwards’ phone rang at his office
on the campus of Virginia Tech.

But this wasn’t a standard call about pipe leaks or sewage
treatment methods. The call was from LeeAnne Walters, a
stay-at-home mother of four in Flint, Mich. Edwards, 52, listened
carefully as Walters described brownish tap water that smelled
terrible; family members with thinning hair, rashes and abdominal
pain; and frustrating assurances from state and local
officials—whom she had repeatedly notified about her
troubling water—that it was safe.

“Oh no,” Edwards recalls thinking. “Here we go
again.”

About a decade earlier, Edwards began his rise to national
recognition when he discovered that the water supply in Washington,
D.C., was contaminated with lead from corroded pipes, and that
thousands of children were ingesting the potent neurotoxin. Edwards
reported his findings to the authorities, including the EPA and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but nothing
happened. In fact, the CDC issued a report downplaying the health risk. So
Edwards spent the next six years and thousands of dollars of his
own money (including a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “Genius
Grant” he won in 2007) working to expose the truth and the
surrounding cover-up. Finally, in 2010, a congressional
hearing concluded that the CDC report was
“scientifically indefensible.” The public was outraged,
and Edwards’ reputation as a dogged researcher willing to
take on some of the country’s most entrenched and powerful
regulatory agencies was sealed.

EDWARDS GREW UP in and around Ripley, N.Y., a speck of a
farm town on Lake Erie about 70 miles southwest of Buffalo. The son
of a schoolteacher and a stay-at-home mom, he attended a
one-building K-12 country school; as a teenager, he worked in the
fields alongside immigrant farmhands. These humble beginnings, he
says, were instrumental in giving him the values that guide him
today.

“Ripley was a poor but amazing place. As a kid growing up
there, you felt lucky to get a job with the immigrant laborers in
the grape vineyards. You worked all day with them, and you were
happy that someone was paying you a farm minimum wage.

“When you grow up that way,” he says, “you
never consider looking down on poor people. How could you?
You’d be looking down on yourself.”

Arriving at UB in 1982, Edwards decided to take on a “huge
challenge”: majoring in biophysics. “At that time, it
was the most rigorous science program at the school,” he
says. “You had to take, essentially, three years of physics,
mathematics, biology and chemistry. You were totally immersed in
science, and it was very tough. But I also had some wonderful
science teachers, both in college and in high school, and that was
very humbling. I try to live up to their example every
day.”

Having learned, as he puts it, “to worship at the altar of
science,” Edwards went on to earn a PhD in environmental
engineering at the University of Washington, then spent several
years teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder before joining
the faculty of Virginia Tech’s civil and environmental
engineering department in 1997.

What followed, he says, was a busy period of teaching and
research, during which time he remained “incredibly
naïve” about how science can be used to justify
decision-making that can adversely impact the public.
“You’re on this treadmill where everything is about
getting money from research grants, getting publications, and if
you aren’t careful, you can lose yourself completely and
forget that science is supposed to be about advancing the public
good.”

But Edwards was spared that fate—if painfully—when
he became embroiled in the Washington, D.C., water crisis during
the mid-2000s. While researching pinhole leaks in copper plumbing
systems around the country, he was contacted by a group of D.C.
homeowners who wanted him to check their pipes. Having heard of
occasional problems with lead in the District’s water supply,
Edwards decided to test it, and discovered a much bigger problem
than he had anticipated. Many of the samples he collected contained
enough lead particles to be legally classified as hazardous waste,
capable of causing devastating injuries to the developing brains of
children.

Edwards reported his findings to the appropriate authorities
(the CDC, the EPA and the D.C. water authority). A father of two
himself—his kids were 2 and 4 years old at the time—he
was sure the agencies would alert the public and begin working to
fix the problem. Instead, the CDC issued its false report, while
the water authority, which had been supporting Edwards’
research, withdrew its funding, and the EPA discontinued its
subcontract with him.

Isolated but determined, Edwards continued his research, paying
graduate students out of his own pocket. The Washington Post began
reporting on the story, which led to political intervention, and,
eventually, the congressional hearing which affirmed that the CDC
had misled the public about the health risk. Based on
Edwards’ research, the District’s hazardous
water-supply system was treated with an anti-corrosive chemical
that fixed the problem.

Edwards was vindicated, but the effort took a significant toll
on his finances and his health. He lost significant weight and at
one point was hospitalized for stress. At the same time, he
underwent a remarkable inner conversion, in which he began to study
the humanities as a way of countering, as he explains it, the
“dehumanization” that can overtake
“well-intentioned scientists who fall prey to the deadening
impact of relying on reason and nothing else.”

“When that happens,” he says, “human beings
can become mere data on a page of scientific research. And history
shows us that terrible things can take place when ‘bad
science’ is allowed to shape policies and decisions affecting
the public good.”